Surfing the web:

IS IT WORTH YOUR TIME?

As a pastoral minister faced with a myriad of responsibilities, you may be convinced there is nothing on the World Wide Web valuable enough to merit your spending time to investigate this growing phenomenon. However, despite the blitz of negative media coverage and the attention paid to the less savory aspects of this mode of information sharing, a great deal of material is available to help you in your work.
Just as your job is varied and wide-ranging, so too is the content on the World Wide Web. The WWW is not a computer network; it is a software system running on the internet, which is the actual computer network. Whether you use an online service such as America Online or an internet service provider (ISP), the access to a great source of unbelievably varied information is just waiting for you.
As you begin your adventure, you can perform certain actions to make your journey smoother. Although all web addresses or URLs (Uniform Resource Locator) begin with the phrase "http://", most web browsers anticipate this, and you need only enter the remainder of the information. In rare instances, however, you will have to enter the entire URL. If the URL begins with something else, such as "ftp://" or "gopher://", you will not move to another webpage but to another type of internet resource. This presents no difficulty if your browser has been set up correctly, but you must enter the introductor information. As you enter these URLs, disregard any parentheses you see, but make sure that you type the characters exactly. The internet is unforgiving; an added or omitted letter or space will result in an inability to connect to the page.
Waiting for pages to download is unavoidable, so unless you are particularly interested in the pictures on a site, you may adjust your browser to avoid downloading graphics. If there is something on a page you want to see, clicking on the area where the picture would appear allows you to view that portion. If you decide, as you are watching the page download, that this is not something in which you are interested, you may stop the transfer of the file by hitting the Stop button on the toolbar. This button will stop the transmission. Use the Back button to return to the previous webpage.
As you move about the internet, you may lose track of where you have been and wish to return to a particular page. On most browsers, there is a small arrow at the end of the text box where URLs are entered. Clicking on this arrow usually gives you a dropdown list of the most recent sites you have visited. If you are certain that you will return to a site, you can "bookmark" it. This process is called "Favorite Places" in some browsers, but all allow you to connect directly to that page rather than following a path.
Many of the pages you find will serve as valuable references. These reference pages contain a number of hyperlinks, or connections to other webpages. A link in a document contains two parts: the text you can read and the actual Web address (URL) that the browser reads. Most browsers are designed to be used with a mouse and have no keyboard actions for selecting links, so be sure that the computer setup you use to access the internet has a mouse. Most often these links are written as text, which is usually underlined and colored; at other times, clicking on picture links will take you to another document. With most browsers, the mouse pointer changes to a small hand when you point at any type of link, and the URL of the link is displayed somewhere on the screen as well.
One such page of resources is sponsored by Immaculata Regional High School: Resources for Catholic Educators. This page contains more than 2,500 hyperlinks, many of which contain links to other pages which contain links to other pages, and on and on. For example, if you click on the link named "Liturgical Seasons on the Immaculata", you will be sent to Liturgical Seasons on the Immaculata, (see the page name in the browser) which contains additional links involving these periods of the church year. From this page, you could click on the link named "General Roman Calendar" leads you to a list of the solemnities, feasts and memorials for the church year General Roman Calendar. On that same site is Catholic Mobile Liturgical Year, containing connections to the readings for the upcoming Sundays, daily reflections on the readings, lectionary pages, pages dedicated to seasons of the church year and even a link to the Catholic homilies of Andrew Greeley from November 1995 to the present.
The CatholicMobile website itself is a collection of 110 pages with more than 4,400 links divided into such categories as Church, Liturgy, Justice, Morality, Spirituality and others. Still another site is a reference for Jesuit Resources on the World Wide Web. Here you will find links to Spirituality, Retreat Centers, Faith and Justice, Jesuits on the WWW, and many others.Other sites, such as Brother Richard's Favorite URLs: An Index and Navigation Guide, provide links to Religion and Theology, libraries, and information on the internet as well as a section on the Bible which includes a subject locator.
A number of links, including Shrines, Religious Orders, Marian groups and links to other Catholic sites are found at the Apparitions of Jesus and Mary webpage . This is also an example of a page using a picture as a graphic hyperlink.
Ecumenical links as well as connections to documents of Vatican II, Apologetics, Pastoral Care and Family Ministry, Youth Ministry and many other subjects are available from the Mining Company site. This site also invites contributions to bulletin boards with topics that change on a regular basis.
A number of webrings are on the WWW, which are sites of a similar nature that have been linked together. Webpages with appropriate content are invited to join the ring. Once you enter a ring, you may choose a random site or access the links to the next or previous pages in the ring. Among these rings is a Children's Ministry ring containing 66 sites, a Mother Theresa Memorial Ring containing 63 sites and a Roman Catholic Web Ring containing 183 sites. The address for the index for the Roman Catholic Web Ring is New Advent Catholic website, which contains links to The Catholic Encyclopedia, the Summa Theologica, ancient writings and an extensive index; SisterSite, a Cyberplace for Women Religious and Their Friends; St. Andrew Parish Online, which contains a weekly reflection on the Sunday readings, prayer and stories; and American Catholic Online , which includes information on the saint of the day and other information. Many websites may also be found at the webpage of Catholic Campus Ministry at Western Connecticut State. A site search option is included.
The work of a pastoral minister is certainly not limited to theological issues; material to address other facets of your work are readily available as well. You can find an excellent set of links designed specifically for pastoral ministry at the Alcuin and Clemens Libraries' Internet Theology Resources: Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry. This page provides links which address a number of areas available for download, from the location of a file detailing a week of directed prayer in a church setting to a small collection of RCIA clip art. An additional small clip art collection may be found at the Christian clip art page.
A number of magazines have an online presence. Some, such as Modern Liturgy, have portions of their publication available online. Other publications exist only in the electronic medium and are commonly known as e-zines. You can find a partial listing of these publications at churchnet.
Other sites of interest are the 1997 Catholic Internet Directory of Catholic Publications and a guide to Religion on the Internet, with links for newsgroups, e-mail list and the WWW. A complete list of Catholic prayer -- Divine Praises and litanies, prayers for children and many others -- may be accessed at Catholic Prayer. Another excellent collection is the World Wide Web Sources on Prayer.
The day will come, however, when you have a specific purpose for approaching the WWW which these resources do not address. You do not have the time to wander from page to page in search of your topic; you need a way to sort through the information quickly and efficiently. You can accomplish this by trying Yahoo, a web directory site which lists more than 500,000 sites. A directory differs from a search engine in that it is actually compiled by individuals from those pages from which applications have been received. A search engine or "spider" runs automatically and continually visits websites, creating catalogs of pages. Yahoo is not a search engine, but any request entered in Yahoo can be forwarded to a search engine where a more current site may be listed. A growing number of these engines are available to search the content of the World Wide Web and other internet sources and deliver a synopsis of the content to your desktop.
Altavista, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and LookSmart are all well-known search engines and each will approach the task in a slightly different way. As a result of these small differences, often the same query entered in more than one search engine will not yield precisely the same results, although duplication will likely occur.
Your initial effort to enter a topic in a search engine or in a directory such as Yahoo may be answered with an overwhelming number of responses if your request for information is too broad. For example, I typed the query "Catholic + ministry," which resulted in more than 40,000 pages containing information on that subject. Depending on the search engine, placing a phrase in quotation marks insures that the engine will search for those words together. Otherwise, it will go through available pages to find the first word and then retrace those pages for the second word, placing a total of the pages on a list. At times, you may find what you are looking for in the first 10 or 20 choices, but often you must be more specific.
A visit to the site for Search Engine Watch will provide a great deal of information on various search engines and the methods you can use with each for best results. Although this is a subscription site, first-time visitors are invited to browse and learn. You will find an excellent page of links on search engine tutorials and easy-to-follow tables which display the various conventions used by the engines.
Several interesting websites for novice users are available, where you can learn more about the processes involved. You will find a number of sites for beginners. The Virtual Internet guide is located at The Virtual Internet Guide, and you will find an introduction to various facets of the internet. Beginners can visit a site that covers internet information for both the Mac and the PC. The table of contents for the classic Zen and the Art of the Internet is at Zen and the Art of the Interne. Or see A beginning Troubleshooting guide originating in the United Kingdom.
For those who wish to learn more about the internet but still rely on the printed page, see James Barnett's Guide to Netscape Navigator and Peter Kent's Using Microsoft Internet Explorer. An excellent source of professional information is the book Catholicism on the Web by Thomas Fox (1997).
The internet is a broad topic. The focus here has been to suggest WWW sites and means of searching for sites of interest to parish ministers. E-mail, mailing lists, Usenet newsgroups, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Telnet and Gopher are facets of that vast connected network which are outside the scope of this article. However, you may wish to further explore them, depending upon your individual needs.
The World Wide Web is certainly far from perfect. The contents are much like an unjuried art and craft show. Some material is totally unsuitable, much is average, but a great deal is quite attractive and useful. If you perceive the internet as a library that never closes, a place that is ready to provide information when you need it -- which, given your busy schedule, is usually not during regular business hours - - you can benefit from what the WWW has to offer. If you are able to find the information you need and this information makes you more effective as you go about your daily service to others, then the World Wide Web is indeed of benefit to us all.
MLBR> Virginia Kappner is principal of St. Susanna School in Plainfield, Ind., and is currently enrolled in a doctoral program. Her e-mail address is VKappner@aol.com.